What is Canada's largest province by area?

Quebec is Canada's largest province by area, covering 1,542,056 square kilometres. The province is roughly three times the size of France and larger than the entire territory of Alaska. Quebec extends from the United States border in the south to Hudson Strait in the north, a distance of about 1,800 kilometres, and from the Ottawa River and James Bay in the west to Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the east, a distance of about 1,500 kilometres at the widest.

Quebec joined Canadian Confederation on July 1, 1867 as one of the four founding provinces. Its boundaries were extended by the Quebec Boundaries Extension Acts of 1898 and 1912, which transferred the District of Ungava (now Nunavik) from federal control to Quebec. The 1927 Privy Council ruling in Re Labrador Boundary fixed the Quebec-Labrador boundary at the height of land draining into the Atlantic, awarding most of the disputed area to Newfoundland (which joined Canada as a province only in 1949). Quebec sovereigntist governments have never formally accepted the 1927 boundary, though it functions as the de facto border.

Of Quebec's vast territory, the populated southern St. Lawrence Lowlands (stretching from the Ottawa River to the Gulf of St. Lawrence) covers only about 5 per cent of the province but holds roughly 90 per cent of the 8.9 million population. The Canadian Shield covers most of the remaining 95 per cent, with the Laurentian Mountains rising along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Far northern Quebec, including the Ungava Peninsula, is Inuit territory governed under the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975 (covering 14 Cree and Inuit communities).

The much larger but less populous territories of the three federal territories combined exceed Quebec's area: Northwest Territories (1,346,106 square kilometres), Nunavut (2,093,190 square kilometres), and Yukon (482,443 square kilometres). However, none of these is a province. Among provinces, the next-largest after Quebec are Ontario (1,076,395 square kilometres), British Columbia (944,735 square kilometres), Alberta (661,848 square kilometres), and Saskatchewan (651,036 square kilometres). The 10 Canadian provinces together cover about 9.094 million square kilometres, the remainder of Canada's 9.985 million square kilometres being the three territories.